


Getting to Know You

by Fledhyris



Series: Tales From the Bunker [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Crack Treated Seriously, F/M, Gen, Humor, M/M, Multiple Selves, Post-Season/Series Finale, bunker in a bubble, character zoo, too many tropes to tag
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-22
Updated: 2020-07-22
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:08:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,718
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25435135
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fledhyris/pseuds/Fledhyris
Summary: I'm writing a story where the Sam'n'Deans from all my AUs meet, in a plot that resolves s15 - and wraps up all my universes - in a way that is (I hope) kinder than I anticipate from canon. Without spoiling, I had to do something afterwards with all the character muses who are still very active inside my head - and will be at least until all their stories are told! So I put them all together in a virtual bunker.It’s not really part of my official multiverse, but they continue to interact in there (often at highly inconvenient times, such as when I’m up against a deadline) and writing things down helps to keep them appeased. I thought I might as well post their stories; possibly it’s a bit of a wacky concept, but hey, we’re Supernatural fans, wacky is our default setting 😁So here is the first of my Tales from the Bunker - more of an intro to the way things work and who everyone is, but later stories will follow the more usual format of direct interaction, POV and dialogue and, I promise, quite a lot of ridiculously sexy shenanigans.NOTE: There is a cornucopia of tropes in this series, nothing graphic enough to tag in this work, but please see end notes for a run-down of what to expect.
Relationships: Dean Winchester & Dean Winchester, Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester, Dean Winchester/Sam Winchester, Sam Winchester & Sam Winchester
Series: Tales From the Bunker [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1842292
Comments: 12
Kudos: 11





	Getting to Know You

Getting used to twelve pairs of nearly identical clones, all packed into one bunker, took quite a bit of adjustment. Frankly, it was chaos, and the inevitable tensions escalated dangerously close to fighting, now and again. Systems had to be put in place to maintain peace, order and fairness. Timetables for use of the bathroom, kitchen and gym; cleaning rotas; supply runs. 

The local town of Lebanon was contained within their little artificial bubble universe, though empty of people. Through some mysterious agency, the shops were always full of fresh supplies, freezers and refrigerators kept running, so that they never wanted for any of the basic necessities. There was something creepy about visiting town, so silent and unchanging as though held in stasis, and being able to just walk in and help themselves from the shelves without paying; as though the place were some kind of giant storage facility made expressly for their needs. 

After their initial investigations proved that the population was indeed absent, not rotting in their beds and haunting the place nor lurking out in the woods as zombies - or any of a dozen other kinds of monsters - waiting to jump out or to gather en masse to attack the bunker, they spent as little time there as possible. There was enough available countryside to take a trip if the bunker began to seem too confining, and at least the weather and the wildlife seemed normal. Sometimes, after a full moon, the werewolves would bring back a deer and everyone feasted on roasted venison.

The biggest problem was Baby. The ghosts had their own version which nobody wanted to touch, parked at the end of the garage where she couldn’t be mistaken, but all the other Deans had to share one car and they weren’t happy about it. The rule was that if you took her out, you washed her down afterwards, making sure there was nothing for anyone else to gripe about. There was a rota for that, too. 

All the regulations felt a little restrictive, like being with Dad back in the day, but it was better than the surreal state of arguing with yourself. The Deans were more inclined to get aggressive; the Sams tended to sulk, and if there was one thing all the Deans could agree on, it was that the atmosphere was bad enough with one petulant sasquatch brooding in the shadows; two or more of them made the place damn near unbearable.

After a while though, everyone settled into a sort of routine and became used to hanging around with a crowd like a funhouse of mirrors. It wasn’t too different from how things had been when the bunker housed all the refugees from Apocalypse World, with the advantage that nobody here was a stranger, and with enough differences among them to keep things from getting stale. 

The Sams busied themselves with research and cataloguing and earnest, late night discussions of lore, metaphysics and moral philosophy which sent the Deans, eyes rolling, to group around the liquor cabinet and show off hunting techniques. They didn’t exactly get falling down drunk, at least not frequently, but every evening was as convivial as a visit to a bar and that was probably the root cause of the whole game with the rooms.

The bunker had ten bedrooms, just enough for each set of Winchesters if they all shared, like back in the old days of living from one motel to another. Two pairs didn’t require a bedroom at all. Nobody could quite recall how many rooms the original bunker had boasted; definitely more than two, because there had been guest rooms, but the feeling was that it might have expanded a little to accommodate. No big deal, you don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, after all. 

Right at the start, there was some awkward discussion around whether Deanna should have a room all to herself, but she squashed that idea firmly, insisting that her Sam was not going to camp out in the library and they were just as used to sharing as any of the others. Deanna was fierce about not receiving special treatment, although she did claim exclusive use of the bathroom on the rota, which was only reasonable. 

The rooms were small, but had just enough space to fit two beds without actually having to push them together in the middle, although some of the pairs did exactly that. The fact of the rooms each having two beds in the first place was just another gift horse, soon forgotten in the banal necessity of daily use.

The problem with having so many bedrooms, each; because of the similar tastes of their occupants; looking pretty much the same, was that it was difficult for everyone to remember exactly whose room was which. Stumbling late to bed after a particularly intensive drinking session, the Deans found it hard to remember even their own rooms. They had numbers, but they had all spent so long in the original bunker that those tended to slip beneath notice; and anyway, they had all once used the same room, to which instinct guided their feet through the happy haze of alcohol. Remembering numbers for all the other Deans and Sams in case you wanted to pay a visit was just out of the question. 

It was unanimously agreed that they needed something more distinctive, something unique and personal, to use as room signs. And so began a hilarious game, part scavenger hunt and part prank war, to decorate the doors of the bunker’s complement of bedrooms so that nobody could fail to know whose room they were passing. There were only two rules: nobody could admit, outright, to having come up with a particular sign (that was to avoid confrontation); and you couldn’t take down a sign from any door without making a substitution.

The ghosts, of course, did not sleep; and because she was the object that anchored their haunting, any downtime they required tended to be spent in their own original copy of Baby, who had come with them, complete with the lacquered boxes containing their polished remains. This turned the garage into another bedroom, of sorts, so in order not to leave them out of the game, a poster for the Ghostbusters movie (the original, of course, with Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd) was taped up over the door. Some time later, someone rigged up an alarm so that whenever the door to the garage was opened, the distinctive klaxon from the movie would sound. Ghost!Dean assured everyone, with an easy smile that rode an edge like a knife blade, that if anyone stretched the theme to putting lights on the top of his Baby, he would freeze their balls solid.

That poster came from the Fortress of Dean-a-tude, but the game called for more creative genius than could be found pinned to the walls of the bunker’s rec room. It appeared that they had internet - a working link, download only, to the real world (a world?) that carried on without them, so they could search the web and watch TV (and there was a huge flatscreen in the Dean Cave, yet another gift horse, which engendered the opinion in most of the bunker’s inhabitants that one of them owed Ka, on all their behalf) so they were able to print out anything they could find.

The other Winchesters who didn’t take up a standard room were the pair from Water World, as the others inevitably called it. If the original bunker hadn’t had a swimming pool on the roof, it certainly did now, and everyone pitched in willingly to help set things up as comfortably as possible. There were potted palm trees strung with lights and a hammock for Sam, and a little tin-roofed shelter for when it rained; a radio; and deck chairs and even a little mini bar for anyone who wanted to come up and chat. That Sam spent most of his time up here, since Mer!Dean of course was unable to leave the pool.

A poster of Disney’s The Little Mermaid was taped to the door which led up a narrow, spiralling iron staircase to the roof. The picture bewildered Water World Sam, so of course everyone had to introduce him and his brother to the movie, fetching up the laptop, popcorn and a keg of beer to make a group night of it. Once they got over the miracle of technology, they both enjoyed it, chuckling over some privately shared joke about the sea witch being half octopus. 

After that, the laptop often went missing in the evenings, as the two caught up on all the delights of modern entertainment that had been missing from their lives. Nobody could find it in themselves to resent this monopolisation of resources. Mer!Dean’s freedom was horribly restricted, even if the pool was large, and improbably equipped with a wave machine.

The poster prank really came into its own over the door to vampire Dean’s room. Almost every week saw a different joke out of the rich vein of material from vampire movies and TV series. Twilight, True Blood, Nosferatu, Blade; all the Hammer Horror Dracula classics with Christopher Lee; Angel from Buffy the Vampire Slayer (and Spike - ‘Hey, doesn’t he look a lot like that warlock, the one whose wife was going around killing people because apparently they were too good for Jeremy Kyle?’) and even, at one point, Lesbian Vampire Killers. The wide-held suspicion was that Fang!Dean himself had put that one up. 

One time, someone nailed up a large crucifix to make a change from the poster parade, which Sam really didn’t appreciate. His answer to that was to switch the cross out publicly for an obscure painting of some medieval woman in a white ruff and lace cap, which went against one of the cardinal rules, but he made such a major bitch face that nobody felt like calling him on it. The crucifix had been a little crass. The painting had all the Deans puzzled, which made all the Sams annoyingly smug for about a week, until someone put two and two together, remembering Sam’s peculiar fetish for serial killers, and a single web search proved it to be the Countess Elizabeth Báthory. That joke earned Fang!Sam a large measure of respect within their strange little conjoint community.

The room belonging to the two wolf brothers saw a turnaround of posters too, the subject matter ranging from actual werewolves to dogs. The latter included Lassie, Turner & Hooch (with their names underneath, assigning Sam as Tom Hanks and Dean as the slobbering Beasley) and Lady and the Tramp. Opinion was neatly divided, with that one, over which dog represented which brother. One time, someone added a picture of Star Wars’ Chewbacca, the wookiee, to pair up with Lon Chaney’s iconic Wolfman and scrawled ‘Bigfoot finds his mate at last!’ across the bottom.

The idea of hanging up a dog collar came up during one of the evening whiskey sessions; but the only known collar in the bunker was permanently fixed around the neck of one of the Deans, not counting the suspect contents of one of the curse boxes in the archives, which it would have been extremely foolish to mess with. Luckily, the conversation moved on and the idea was forgotten before anyone could take a trip into town and visit the pet section of the agricultural supplies store.

Keeping to the spirit of the game, the wolves never tore down their posters, but as soon as a new one was put up, it was mysteriously defaced with a diagonal set of four slashing claw marks that dug right down into the wood behind it. Each successive tear was laid precisely over the last, so that the gouges bit deeper and deeper into the door. Eventually, a picture of a dog kennel was replaced with [an art print from pinterest](https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/557953841331451718/) which featured three wolves cheekily presenting their backsides to the viewer before a full moon. This remained un-clawed and became the de-facto signature of the room. The game had been gradually running out of steam since the first few weeks, anyhow.

A dog collar would have been an excellent indicator for the room of that Dean who was, to the initial discomfort of many of the other Winchesters, bound to his Sam as some kind of consensual slave, or pet. The first thing to go up on their door was a printout of some basic bondage equipment: a whip, handcuffs, a ball gag and nipple clamps. The following day, over breakfast, Sam calmly informed the room at large that they didn’t use any of those things; and since Dean was kneeling beside his chair at the time, being hand fed from Sam’s plate, nobody could look anyone in the eye for the remainder of the meal. 

A much funnier solution presented itself in the form of a real pair of handcuffs, hanging from a nail. They were wrapped in pink acrylic fur. Nobody (except their instigator) had the slightest idea where they could have come from, but that didn’t matter. A little tag dangled from one cuff, reading ‘for use in an emergency’. Sam was enigmatically tolerant of the whole joke; Dean was openly amused. The cuffs stayed.

The other rooms were likewise left alone with the first or second joke somebody came up with. Deanna’s door started out with a poster of Buffy, which she fully appreciated, but when Fang!Dean’s door obtained a poster of Angel and people started joking that the two of them should hook up, Buffy was quietly replaced with a Tank Girl poster instead, and everyone got the message.

Deanna emphatically denied having anything to do with the sign for the one Dean who couldn’t look at her, even eye to eye, and would wait at the end of a corridor or double back into the room he had just come from, rather than risk squeezing past her in a narrow space. Someone pinned up the front cover of a Busty Asian Beauties magazine, painting a red ‘no go’ sign over it - a circle with a diagonal line, carefully obscuring the model’s most prominent details. The sign stayed, so it couldn’t have been doing any actual harm, but Dean still closed his eyes whenever he opened his own door.

Several other signs were just as raunchy in tone, suggesting that the primary impetus was from one or more of the Deans. A room service ‘Do Not Disturb’ placard hung on the door to the room of the alpha and omega pair, featuring the silhouette of a couple (male and female, but that was beside the point) engaged in sex. During ‘that time of the month’, Sam added a post-it note with SERIOUSLY written on it in black marker. It had taken only one accidental interruption for the whole bunker to get the idea that at certain times, off-limits was for everyone’s peace of mind. The bunker walls were pretty solid, but it was still fairly evident when the two of them were cooped up together during a heat, so the post-it was largely superfluous.

Much debate raged around how to mark the door of the Dean to whose existence, or rather his (not) girlfriend’s, they all owed their lives. Weather jokes, his brother warned everyone, were likely to turn confrontational, but there was no ignoring the fact that they were all here because of the sky goddess. His sign started out as a benign, fluffy looking cloud, soon embellished with a rainbow, and then someone (possibly Sam himself) hung a dreamcatcher in the middle, because apparently those appealed to Ka. Another room service sign soon appeared, tied to the large central feather of the dreamcatcher. It was extremely tacky, shaped like a pink flamingo (and where were all these motel signs coming from? Did one of them have a secret collection from over the years?) and left to rotate freely, just in case Ka ever dropped by and Dean felt like advertising that they needed some alone time. As if.

One door out of all of them stayed free from the slightest hint of humour. The game arose some time after Ka had visited the dungeon and bound Michael more securely, so that Vessel!Dean could walk around freely and interact with the others. But everyone was uneasily aware that the archangel was still inside him, sleeping perhaps but never to be taken for granted. Besides that, Dean was clearly still suffering from the glowing sigils that faded in and out across his skin, making him twitch constantly with a barrage of minor electric shocks. It didn’t feel right to poke fun at his condition; between them all, they had plenty of memories of torment, possession and subjugation to the will of Heaven and Hell’s mightiest adversaries.

They painted the angel banishing glyph on his door (though nobody was sure if that would work on Michael, let alone where it would send him given the peculiar isolation of their environment), ready for activation should the need arise; but the likelihood of him sitting quietly in his room in that case was remote. Really, the symbol just stood as a reminder to everyone not to forget what this Dean could become, if Ka’s warding were to fail.

No such consideration was given to the Dean whose existence revolved even more closely around his brother than that of the one in the collar. He, too, had suffered more than most at the hands of Michael, but his current condition made him mellow about it. Their door sported an ad for the [De Agostini ‘Magiki cuddle buddies’](https://www.deagostini.com/uk/collections/magiki-cuddle-buddies/) range of plush toys, and not much more needed to be said to describe their situation.

The final door, to the room housing four rather than two occupants, featured the striped raccoon tail off a hunting cap, pinned inventively to a picture of Wiley Coyote. Sam didn’t like the tail, which was a poor imitation of his little familiar’s in the first place, but Dean found it funny and wouldn’t let him take it down. Instead, Sam kept trying to reattach the thing in a less suggestive position, but he might as well have stopped bothering, because someone (likely his own brother) always put it back.

Some of the Sams might have felt a little resentful that the game excluded them; even if they were grateful to escape being the butt of so many jokes. They all loved Dean, but none of them wanted to be defined by his brother. However, there was no getting around the fact that the Deans were much more different from one another than most of the Sams; at least to casual observation; and it was those differences which prompted the humour in the room signs, and in the nicknames everyone adopted by unspoken but unanimous agreement. 

Identification was impossible (except in Deanna’s case) by facial recognition alone; you had to look for other points of reference. A leather collar; animals underfoot; glowing symbols etched into the skin. Sam from Water World spent most of his time on the roof with his brother, and went everywhere barefoot and in shorts; it wasn’t too hard to make out the webbing between his fingers and toes if you looked hard enough. Nobody was ever going to misidentify Mer!Dean’s sleek seal tail, even during a summer pool party.

Subtler signs to look out for: the ghosts appeared washed out, not pale so much as leached of colour, their clothes as well as their faces, and had a disconcerting tendency to flicker - or to abruptly disappear when finished with a conversation. They also rarely left one another’s side, since to roam the bunker they had to carry their keyring with its charm-like attachment of two pinkie finger bones. Other Deans rarely found apart from their brothers were the one in a collar (except when he was busy in the kitchen), and the one everyone came quickly to refer to as Xanax!Dean for his thoroughly laid-back and chilled demeanour. There was no mistaking that pair, since they stuck together like velcro, with one to be found lounging just outside the door whenever the other was in the can. 

Nobody wanted to rile the wolves or the vampire enough to see what made them different, and three of the Deans had no physical characteristics or brotherly dependence to mark them out at all - at least outside of being in heat, when one pair of Winchesters were notable mainly by their absence and the muffled noises coming from their room at all hours. Apart from those with a greater than usual sibling codependency, only two Sams - the ghost and the one from Water World - had any visually identifiable characteristics to mark them apart. Familiar!Sam had Pua, of course, but she was often tucked away, sleeping in a pocket or snuggled up on his shoulder under his hair, and hard to spot; and the familiars weren’t always to be found with their humans, in any case. They were just as likely to be spotted on their own, racing after one another through the corridors or hunting for mice among the library shelves, attempting to raid the fridge, or curled up together asleep in some warm, out of the way corner of the bunker.

So to prevent social interaction from becoming an endless game of Clue, it became an unwritten rule of etiquette that, before engaging in any conversation longer than a grunted greeting in passing, you introduced yourself: “Hey, Familiar!Sam. Do you know who tidied away that copy of _De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas_ I was researching?” Or, “Wolf!Dean. Gimme the bacon. No, the uncooked bacon!” Deliberate pranks of misidentification were frowned upon, but inevitable; things always resolved at bedtime, anyway. And so harmony was maintained, by and large, and everyone rubbed along tolerably well, even growing used to the more outlandish sexual exploits of the Wincest couples, or the occasional dominance battle between the weres and Fang!Dean.

That is, everyone got along until boredom set in, and in the absence of hunting, people began looking for more diverting ways to pass the time…

**Author's Note:**

> If you are wondering who on earth all these different Sams and Deans are and where they came from, you can find them in my other works, where each pair has their own AU series which I am simultaneously working on (some have more stories in them currently than others). For ease of reference, here are the links to each series so you can visit the ones you like most. **Please regard tags and warnings** for each individual series AND separate works within! I cover a lot of different tropes, behaviours and potential kinks/squicks.
> 
> **Wincest or Wincest-adjacent AUs**  
> [Bound Verse:](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1350982) (collared, sub!Dean)  
> [Fang Verse:](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1349902) (vampire Dean)  
> [Isis Verse:](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1350919) (unrequited: Dean can’t have, or even think about, sex with anyone unless it’s Sam)  
> [Omega Verse:](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1379326) (alpha Sam, omega Dean)  
> [Sea Verse:](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1350826) (mer Dean)  
> [Wolf Verse:](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1350838) (werewolves Dean and Sam)  
> [Xanax Verse:](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1350829) (Gencest: cuddly, blissed out, dependent Dean who is all over Sam like hair on the couch)
> 
> **Gen AUs** (or are they? The muses have been known to surprise me ;)  
> [Deanna Verse:](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1350835) (Dean was born with two X chromosomes but is still the same kickass hunter)  
> [Familiar Verse:](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1350823) (where everyone’s soul manifests as an animal companion)  
> [Ghost Verse:](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1351003) (carrying on the family business together, even after death)  
> [Sky Verse:](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1350952) (Dean’s complicated relationship with the primordial entity who was instrumental in saving everyone from Chuck’s s15 apocalyptic spree)  
> [Vessel Verse:](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1350940) (Dean still has Michael inside him, but safely contained)
> 
> [Mark of Cain Dean](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1350973) (if you were wondering) is not present in the bunker. He has a very important role to play in the end story, but don’t worry; he gets the best solution I can give him. I love all my Deans and Sams and don’t want to see any of them hurting forever.


End file.
